00:06 Speaker A

Now time for some of today’s trending tickers with Yahoo Finance’s Pras Subramanian. Just going to start here with Rivian, a name Pras knows well. Those shares, they’re jumping. It’s after the company’s earnings beat, strong guidance. Uh so better than expected Q4 results, first ever annual gross profit. There’s a milestone. Uh you spoke to the CEO. What did he have to say?

00:20 Pras Subramanian

Yeah, I mean, they’re very excited about like the he’s really excited about R2. That’s the new upcoming, the mid-sized EV SUV.

00:28 Speaker A

Yeah, 30% pop.

00:30 Pras Subramanian

30% It’s going to have the biggest day in their history, right? I mean R2, that that car is coming in Q2. They said they’re on on track for customer deliveries. The the validation builds are happening in the factory. Uh their guidance for the year, over 62,000 or so vehicles a year was better than Wall Street expected. Uh like you mentioned, uh a profit for the year, gross profit, but driven by a lot of software and service sales to Volkswagen for their G-JV partner. So a lot of good stuff happening there with the company. Uh, also, uh RJ Scaringe said they might look at opportunity be opportunistic with regards to capital raising, which caught me by surprise, meaning that there that that is part of the equation if need be, but they have $6 million of runway at the moment. So they should be okay. It’s all about can they execute this year? Can they sell a lot of these R2s that have a much better uh bill of sale materials less for them costly.

01:05 Speaker A

Yeah, make money, right?

01:06 Speaker A

Let me ask you, do you, there’s some analysts I know who cover this space and these names and they say, dude, in the US EV market, they’ll say Tesla still stands apart. It it’s Musk’s world. And they’ll say Rivian, like we’ll give them the silver, but Musk rules it. Is that how you see it or no? You think you would compare and contrast them differently?

01:29 Pras Subramanian

I think that’s probably accurate for now, but if if R2, which is going getting some great reviews right now, it’s basically the same size as the Model Y, right? Model Y is one of the top selling vehicles overall in the United States, let alone in EV. It’s the number one easily selling EV. If the R2 can compete at that level at price, functionality, uh looks, right, looks very different, not so bubbly as the Model Y is. I think Rivian has a strong case to make that, hey, we can make uh popular, uh effective, efficient, and also profitable EVs like Tesla.

02:00 Speaker A

Team at Canaccord Genuity, they got a buy on this one. Here’s what they told their clients. They said, we love a good product story. Rivian is ready to launch and ready to meet the moment of truth. I love the drama. Moving over to Applied Materials. Those shares ripping higher after reporting Q1 results. Why do we care about Applied materials? Because this is the biggest US supplier of of chip making gear. That’s why you care. The stock is a monster. It has surged, upbeat sales forecast. The CEO is basically saying, listen, I’m seeing these acceleration in industry investments in AI computing and that’s a big tailwind for me and my company. Stock is up now 90% in the past 12 months. And you know what, even here, even here at these levels, Pras, about nine, about 80%, more than 80% of analysts say yes, Pras, you should buy this.

02:50 Pras Subramanian

I mean, I think this stock’s up 30% this year. I mean, not including today’s movement. I think it’s insane.

02:56 Speaker A

It’s roaring off that print.

02:57 Pras Subramanian

I mean these chip makers still making the money machine go burr, right? I mean this is just massive, massive gains here. Look all tied to AI, right? Supporting those orders, chips, right? Chip making fabrication stuff here, right? Uh management pointing to leading edge logic chips, high high-bandwidth memory using these data centers, right? So the question is how long can that trade last, right? Are we many people it’s really two sides of of two big trades, right? It’s bubble, AI bubble, not going to happen or this is just the beginning of the massive, massive AI buildout. I mean you’re talking about, you know, uh gigawatt style, gigawatt, 1 gigawatt uh uh a data center, cost 30 billion dollars, you know?

03:30 Speaker A

Yeah. Yeah. huge amounts huge amounts of money cause all the all these tech CEOs say, you know what, we’re chasing demand and we can see the utilization. Here’s I like this comment from Bernstein’s Stacy Rasgon, friend of the show, one of the best in the game. He looked at this applied materials print, he took his target to 425, said we like the semi caps here, the heavy lifters he calls them, the AI area. He’s preferred AMAT he said. He lists the reasons, he says high exposure to key areas like DRAM, lower China exposure versus peers, cheaper valuation. Tells his clients, we see no reason to change our view on that at this point.

04:12 Pras Subramanian

Maybe it’s a, it’s a better bet, not better bet but maybe a safer bet than Nvidia which is so leveraged to to the AI build out, uh the data center build out. But also I mean what about Corsair today? Corsair, big big DRAM maker, right? Big for for not just gaming but also data centers and also just just chip making in general. I mean just having a huge day today. Uh so it’s this trade is really rolling on tonight. And I just have to wonder, you know, um we talk about I saw a stat today that said software stocks are now flat for the last five years or something like that.

04:41 Speaker A

We’ll pull up a chart of the IGV, man. It’s right back to the pre-lows of last year. It’s brutal.

04:45 Pras Subramanian

Is the money just pouring into this, right? That’s the big question.

04:47 Speaker A

Yeah. Brutal.

04:51 Speaker A

All right, finally here, uh Apple coming off its worst trading day since April with Siri and FTC in focus. You know, different headlines this week, Pras, um not great for Apple. So, yeah, the FTC chairman, he issues a letter to Tim Cook, says the company could be violating the FTC Act if it misrepresents Apple News or or violates uh terms of service. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman was also reporting, we referenced there Apple’s latest attempts to launch the new and improved Siri. Uh that apparently, according to Gurman, running into some snags. Where are we off today?

05:27 Pras Subramanian

I mean, I really, the FTC stuff is somewhat notable, but I think the big thing is Siri, right? This is supposed to be the new update 26.4, I believe coming out this spring. Uh Gurman talking about how this is being pushed back. I mean, Siri, so many issues. Let’s start with the fact that the product itself is not so compelling at this point, still. Uh was it a year and a half ago we had that big uh WWDC time about what’s going to happen with Siri intelligence. All these features that we were all kind of clamoring for, possibly not real, possibly just vaporware. And now that we, you know, we’re kind of hearing that, you know, it’s something very un-Apple like to show something that’s not fully ready, right? And then we heard, okay, Google Gemini coming on on board as a partner. That’s going to fix a lot of these things. Great. We’re excited about that. Uh finally some full integration between what’s happening in my calendar, my emails and tell Siri to help me out, rebook a flight, etc. That’s what we kind of want. And we’re thinking that we were going to get that, but now we’re we’re hearing according to Gurman, not so fast, maybe later this year.

06:21 Speaker A

The only pushback I would say there is that I would look at that last earnings report from Cupertino and I remember talking to Howley about it. I’m like, dude, that was a solid print. iPhone growth was up I think uh 23%, beat the street, which leads me to believe that for all the talk right now, you know why people still want new iPhones? Processors, cameras, batteries. Same old, man, same old.

06:54 Pras Subramanian

Well, yeah, it makes you makes you makes you think like, we didn’t need it before, right? We’re all using iPhones anyway. Do we need the Siri intelligence so badly?

07:03 Speaker A

I’ll tell you what you need. You need that foldable maybe coming in September. That’s what’s on.

07:06 Pras Subramanian

Yeah, did you see that? Yeah.

07:07 Speaker A

Yeah. Hey Pras, thanks.